Editor’s Note
Volume 27. Congrats to the Knicks, well deserved. NYC is on quite the heater… Also, how sick was the UFC White House card? Politics aside, those fights were insane.
Some big news: companies in the No Huddle family continue to crush it and it's time we bring them back into the press. So I'm pumped to roll out No Huddle Alumni - a new section in our flagship newsletter that catches you up on the latest from companies we've previously covered.
While you’re here:
If you want to be featured, connect with founders in the No Huddle family, or have suggestions to help No Huddle grow, just reply to this email or reach out directly to me at [email protected].
Let’s keep it rollin’! 🤘 Subscribe
🎓 NO HUDDLE ALUMNI
Welcome to the first No Huddle Alumni feature, where we revisit past companies to see how they've grown.
First up: Waypoint, in the more-topical-than-ever college sports space.
Back in Volume 21, I laid out the new college revenue playbook - turning fan loyalty into a commercial engine instead of a donor list. Waypoint is building the travel beachhead for exactly that.
Now, they've gone a layer deeper. Waypoint’s new product, Fan Atlas, is built on a simple bet: the most valuable asset in college sports has been hiding in plain sight. It's fan loyalty - and no program has ever had a way to actually see it.
Fan Atlas maps it all out: the influential nodes in a fan base, how they connect, and where the devotion really lives. We’re talking about social media posts, baby photos in school colors, flags at weddings, the rabid fan boards running strong for decades. West Virginia's atlas already has hundreds of thousands of fans scored and ranked.
Here's the key takeaway: you can't reward what you can't see, and you can’t monetize what you can't measure. Waypoint just turned a feeling into legit infrastructure - and the market's just starting to catch on.
Loyalty was always the asset. Waypoint drew the map.
Reach out if you want to speak directly to the Waypoint management team.
⚡The Highlight
Most commerce platforms start with the catalog. Kitme is betting the better starting point is the closet you already own - and the $3 trillion of purchase data already sitting in your inbox to prove it.
(more below)
🎙 In the Pocket
How I am seeing the field across sports, media, entertainment, wellness and CPG
Aside from TB12 and the ‘04 Sox, sneaker culture was my first true love. I was obsessed with designing, researching and tracking all of the latest and greatest across Nike, Jordan, Adidas, Reebok (s/o to John Wall and ZigTech) and Converse. I waited in lines, lost to bots and traded shoes in Facebook groups at a way younger age than I probably should have been doing, but I loved every second of it.
And looking back, the wild part isn't that I was obsessed - it's that the obsession never had an expiration date. The grails I chased as a kid are still grails. The kicks I'd have to do years worth of chores for still sit at the top of the mountain. And it’s not just me. Jumpman is always up to somethin’. MJ hasn't played an NBA game since 2003, and Jordan Brand still did $7+ billion in revenue last fiscal year. Damn.
A man who retired before TikTok existed sells more products than most countries' entire apparel industries. That's not just a sneaker business. That's culture.
Jordan was the trailblazer to the power of athletes and the broader creator economy. If you wore Jordans, you got to feel “Like Mike”. You got to be the guy.
Look at where the crossover has gone. Kanye turned a limited sneaker into a balance sheet: Yeezy was, at its peak, a multi-billion-dollar line generating $1.3 billion in a single year before… Well, we all know what happened there.
Travis Scott took the Jordan silhouette he grew up on and turned his collabs into instant assets - kicks that retail for $150 and trade for four figures hours later, helping push a sneaker resale market that's projected to hit $30 billion by 2030. I’m still waiting for the Travis Scott x Jordan 1 Low price to drop to cop a pair or two. A musician became a market maker in footwear and nobody blinked!
Then there's arguably the fastest-moving corner of all: women's sports. Women's tennis has become a full-blown runway. Coco Gauff has turned tournaments into a fashion event with New Balance x Miu Miu capsules and different outfits in every city. "Tenniscore" racked up north of 20 million views on TikTok, proving that athletes aren't just endorsing the trend, they are the trend.
And if you want the clearest combo that fashion and sports have fully merged, look no further than NikeSKIMS, which launched last fall. The most valuable name in sportswear partnering with a shapewear brand that just raised at a $5 billion valuation. Nike’s turning to fashion to help course correct their business.
Sneaker lines and the tennis outfits are just the start though. All of this lives downstream of the creator economy - a ~$250 billion machine projected to hit $500 billion by 2027. Gen Z is the engine of that machine, swiping and clicking with a reported $360 billion in spending power and accounting for 5% of U.S. consumer spend today (a number set to more than triple to 17% by 2030). Gen Z spends roughly $1,700 a year each on apparel, and they shop much differently than our grandparents did. There's no department store or list. It's limited edition collabs, TikTok drops, thrift finds, 72-hour pop-up shops and creator-pushed brands.
Here is where my brain goes: all of this consumption is happening, but why isn’t it being tracked by the consumer?
Everyone is buying more across more places with more influence than ever - and there's still no clean way to see what you own, what you actually wear, and what's coming next.
Maybe it’s because some people have so many clothes that it would take weeks to log, or it could be that older platforms left a lot to be desired in their UI, but there’s a gap there. Trillions of dollars of spend and a gold mine of user data just sitting there, waiting to be tapped into…
Enter Kitme 👇
📺 The Watch List
A mini investment memo on the stars of tomorrow
The Company: Kitme
The Business in a tweet: Kitme is the digital closet and discovery platform for consumers. Think Spotify, but built for retail.
The 101:
Industry: Retail Infrastructure / Advertising
Headquarters: New York, NY
Year Founded: 2024
Founding Team/Current Leadership:
Craig Kitto (Co-founder & CEO) - Former GTM lead at Intenseye; built the sales team from $200k to over $10m in revenue. Former Williams College Hockey player.
Madeline Walter (Co-founder & COO) - Ex-Amex, Bond Vet & former assistant to Vogue editor & stylist. At Amex, she recovered $2M in late fee waivers and scaled Bond Vet to 53 clinics. Also a Williams College alum.
Employees: 3
Fundraising Status:
Raising Seed round. Self-funded through August 2025, when the company raised a friends & family round. Focus to date has been almost entirely on user retention and engagement while growing organically.
If you’re interested in learning more, seeing the Kitme investor deck or meeting the team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].
Business Model:
Affiliate commissions on items discovered and purchased through or because of Kitme. The platform earns when its recommendations convert into sales at partner retailers.
Slated to turn on advertising layer in early 2027, which will open a second revenue line item in addition to the affiliate engine
Traction:
Engagement: 45% WAU/MAU - well above the 20–30% benchmark for consumer apps, and the clearest signal Kitme is approaching habit-forming usage.
Growth: 2,400% increase in active users since August 2025, recently surpassed 5,000 users.
Intent: 80% of users open Kitme with clear intent to shop, with 8+ sessions per active user per week and 27% Day-30 retention.
Product depth: The email-sync engine builds a closet of 500+ items per user automatically (no manual uploads) at 90%+ parsing accuracy across retailers
Recent Validation: Over the past year, Kitme has stood up partnerships with leading fashion brands and retailers like SSENSE, Revolve, Mytheresa, FWRD and eBay. They now have a waitlist of 40+ brands wanting to integrate their catalogs into the marketplace. They also added Robert Walter (Founder of Cardinal Health) as an advisor, brining deep expertise in scaling data-driven platforms, enterprise partnerships and category-defining businesses.
Deep Dive:
Pros:
Kitme owns the bridge between what you've bought and what you'll buy next: Most discovery engines use browsing behavior to guess your taste and lead to your next purchase. Kitme starts from your data - what you already own and buy. These data-driven insights can eventually help Kitme become a consumer data intelligence company. That’s where the Spotify comparison really comes into the picture.
Kitme is the first marketplace built on real purchase history, folding zero-party data (your verified purchases), pulled automatically from email receipts and turning them into product recommendations.
Retailer-agnostic by design. Kitme understands as a platform what a user buys across every retailer, not just one merchant's store. That cross-retailer view is what turns a “closet app” into something more.
The full lifecycle in one place. Discover, buy, engage, and ultimately resell - Kitme is building a closed loop with minimal to no handoff across other apps or platforms needed.
A founding team that has scaled a business before. Craig took a sales org from $200K to $10M+ while Madeline scaled Bond Vet to 53 clinics, and also brings real fashion-industry fluency. For a small team operating at this engagement level, the output per employee is quite impressive.
Cons:
The "fashion app" box undersells the thesis. Kitme presents as a closet and styling app, but the actual bet is on a cross-retailer ownership graph - infrastructure, not apparel. The risk is that the market reads the surface and misses the platform underneath, which can cap how investors and partners value it.
The whole product rides on the inbox. The closet is built by reading Gmail purchase receipts - a powerful onboarding trick, but one that depends on continued access to a platform Kitme doesn't control.
A crowded category: Incumbents like Whering (9M+ users) and Acloset (4M) already operate at scale, even with fragmented products. The glass-half-full read: they've proven consumers want this and will download a closet app to try one. The catch is they got there first, and their clunky user experience is exactly the opening Kitme is driving at. The bet is that better execution converts proven demand into users who actually stick.
Capital and attention in the startup and venture worlds are tilted hard toward enterprise and AI infrastructure right now, leaving consumer social platforms - even strong ones - facing a tougher fundraising and narrative environment than they would have a few years ago. When others zig…No Huddle zags!
Comparables:
Kitme Differentiator: Kitme is the only platform that automatically builds a consumer ownership graph from purchase data — enabling personalization based on what consumers actually own, not just what they browse.
📶The Signal (No Huddle’s Take):
Taking off the Red Sox fitted to put my trendsetter hat on now.
The average Gen Z shopper owns 150+ items and wears fewer than 20% of them. Everyone knows the feeling - a full closet, nothing to wear and a bunch of ads that aren’t complementary to what you already own or your buying habits.
Every recommendation engine on the internet is making an educated guess - Spotify from what you listened to, TikTok from what you stuck around to watch, Amazon from what you clicked or purchased. These platforms have built impressive algorithms that are elite at inferring taste from behavior, but they are still relying on several degrees of inference.
Kitme is making a correlated, but different bet by saying that the most valuable signal in retail isn't what you browse for, it's what you actually buy. Nobody has cleanly owned that dataset yet.
What makes the approach interesting to me is how Kitme is going about it. By syncing purchases automatically from Gmail receipts, Kitme captures verified, zero-party ownership data without making the user lift a finger - no manual uploads, no stock-photo closets that don't match reality, no faulty AI that reads your Alo hoodie as Lululemon (the horror). The result is a 500-item closet built in minutes at 90%+ accuracy and that's the unlock the category has been missing. The wardrobe and digital closet act as the way in for the user, but the cross-retailer ownership graph is where Kitme is really trying to take this thing. Early engagement numbers suggest this value proposition is working: 45% WAU/MAU is an impressive number that the Kitme team is squarely focused on maintaining and improving.
It also helps to look at who else is circling this space because it tells you what Kitme could become. ShopMy and LTK have built huge businesses on creator-driven discovery - monetizing what an influencer tells you to buy. Kitme is coming at the same retail dollars from the opposite direction: monetizing what you already own. That's a different and arguably more durable starting point, because it doesn't depend on a creator's taste staying relevant - it depends on your own closet, which in theory compounds over time. It also explains why the natural acquirers are the discovery and re-commerce platforms like Pinterest, eBay, Depop (who eBay agreed to acquire in February 2026 for $1.2bn), and the like.
You can see the logic: a verified, cross-retailer ownership graph is the exact dataset a visual-discovery or creator-commerce giant can't build on its own but craves. LTK, given the demographic overlap also probably sits on the same list as a potential partner, acquirer, or competitor, depending on how the next 12-18 months go.
The risks are out there: the product relies on access to your inbox, and the category is crowded - incumbents like Whering (9M+ users) and Acloset (4M) already operate at real scale - at a time when fewer dollars than ever are flowing into consumer (a thesis No Huddle is happy to take the other side of). But these are navigable problems, because they're about narrative, timing, and distribution, not whether the core product works.
No Huddle sees a lot of companies still hunting for the behavior that proves a thesis. Kitme already has it: users showing up multiple times a week with intent to shop, building a dataset that gets more valuable with every receipt. And all of this on effectively zero acquisition spend.
The infrastructure bet underneath the closet is the one to watch… give Kitme a try for yourself!
If you’re interested in learning more, seeing the Kitme investor deck or meeting the team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].
From the archive
If this week’s KITME issue caught your attention, it is worth revisiting our earlier No Huddle feature on Catch. That piece focused on commerce infrastructure from the venue side; KITME pushes a related question from the consumer side: what happens when the layer between the user and the transaction becomes the real source of leverage?
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